by Liz Plank
For my dad, waffles were not food; they were a lifestyle. He wouldn’t just make a few for Sunday breakfast; he would double the recipe so that we had enough individual waffles to last us for the whole week. My dad also became our family’s maple syrup provider, buying it in bulk so we would never run out. Of course, purchasing maple syrup by the pound was also a surefire way to make sure he got the best price. As he often repeated to me and my sister, paying full price for anything was for “losers.” About once a month, he would make us run down to get more maple syrup from the downstairs bathroom, which had become a storage room for all the cans of maple syrup, a thing my sister and I just assumed was normal until our friends would come over and start asking very valid questions about it. We both were fortunate enough to experience a childhood where our bathroom was always filled with maple syrup and our fridge was always packed with waffles. Every morning before he would drive us to school on his way to his job at the post office, my dad would eat a waffle like it was a piece of toast, nonchalantly flipping the pages of his newspaper. I had read somewhere that the children of parents who had lived through famine or excruciating circumstances had really good metabolisms, and I could see how he had inherited one by the number of waffles I’ve seen him ingest over the course of my life. My grandmother had immigrated to Canada after being orphaned at the age of 11, working as a child domestic servant and then at a refugee camp after World War II. Her unwavering grit had clearly trickled down to my father, both mentally and physically. He had a stellar work ethic and inherited a metabolism that made him tall and skinny despite eating dessert for breakfast. Waffles were in fact such a recurring staple over the course of my life that they became a totally nonexuberant breakfast food for me. The way I feel about waffles is how most people feel about stale cereal. Let’s just say I grew up with a lot of waffle privilege and I’m still learning to check it.
I had a renewed appreciation for my father when I realized that he’d become somewhat of a legend among my male friends, something that was impossible for him to register since he was born with an ego the size of a small raisin. After my coworker and dear friend Liran spent a weekend at my parents’ house in Montreal, I walked by his desk weeks later and saw a Post-it note titled “Questions for Andrew Plank.” Most of the questions were about real estate, one of the many random areas my dad had staggeringly good advice in. When I first moved to New York with my then-boyfriend, he was stunned when my dad drove down from Montreal with the mix for his homemade waffles in a reusable plastic ice-cream container (the same one from when I was a kid) and his waffle irons for us to feast on Sunday morning. “New York City is the food capital of the world; doesn’t he want to us to take him to a restaurant?” my boyfriend said, laughing. But maintaining rituals even after I had moved away is exactly the kind of behavior I had come to expect from my dad, because our entire relationship had been defined by them.
When I was little, our nightly ritual would end with him making my female stuffed monkey converse with me in English (I grew up speaking mostly French). Although I owned forty-six stuffed monkeys (I was convinced I was Jane Goodall), Emma was my first monkey and she had a special place in my heart because she would never turn down a request for a conversation. Emma would ask me about my day, she would ask me about how I was feeling and when I had full-blown meltdowns she would prop my door open with her head and always crack some joke to make me smile. I remain convinced that if more adults had pretend pet monkeys their loved ones could make talk, we’d save a lot of money on therapy. His care and attention continued throughout my time in college. When I performed in The Vagina Monologues, he came to both performances. He recorded the entire play on his camcorder, but, unhappy with the quality of the sound, he came back the next night and heard me say the word “vagina” another forty-nine times. When I ended up in crutches three (Canadian!) winters in a row during college, he made the half-hour drive to downtown Montreal to get me to class and back every single day. Although he worked a full forty-hour workweek at the post office, with an hour commute, he still managed to make me, my sister and my mom feel like we were his number-one priority in his life, mostly because we were.
This story about my dad matters because for far too many children it’s not the norm. While we expect moms to be nurturing, we don’t always expect the same from dads. My father’s parenting style never felt particularly unique or special to me because it was all I knew. But when I would see people’s reactions and shock at my dad’s behavior, it became apparent to me just how unconventional he was. It highlighted one of the biggest lies we perpetuate about men: they’re not naturally good at caring for others, let alone their own children.
I also saw similar reactions from people when I interviewed Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Because I had always been keenly invested in the power of positive fatherhood and believed it could be the key to creating a better future, one of the first questions I wanted to ask him when I got to interview him when I was reporting on the 2016 election for Vox was how he balanced being a father with being the prime minister of Canada. The reaction I received from some of my colleagues and friends in the media surprised me. “How refreshing to hear a man asked about this topic for a change!” Emma Gray wrote in HuffPost Women. I’m not one to reject praise, but it shouldn’t be surprising for men to receive this question: in fact, it should be totally normal and, frankly, boring.
“I take time to work and I take time to play with [the kids]. Similar with Sophie, have time where I’m working and time where I’m just the goofy husband,” the prime minister told me as we sat down waiting for our poutines at a Montreal-style deli in the East Village. He went one step further and said that fatherhood wasn’t just a commitment while he was in the home; it was intrinsically connected to his job as a world leader. “I’m in politics not in spite of the fact that I have kids, but because of the fact that I have kids,” he said. Trudeau explained that he tried to make his children a priority even in his job as he weighed the decisions he made as a politician and that being a father made him better at his job. “Is the time I am away from them compensated by the fact that I’m busy making a better world for them?” Trudeau also spoke about being keenly aware that he was modeling a traditional division of labor to his children given his job. “In a certain sense, highlighting gender stereotypes has been a little more challenging because we’re in a family where, you know, Sophie does a lot of great activism and work and public speaking, but she’s mostly a mom and I’m the one who is the breadwinner and we live in a place because of my job,” he explained. “Part of it is modeling. Showing that I’m attentive and respectful, and very much in a partnership with Sophie as much as we are in a marriage. That I respect her.”
If Justin Trudeau had been a woman, none of what he said about parenting would be newsworthy. In fact, it would be 100 percent basic if it had come out of the mouth of a woman. It was precisely because it was said by a man that made it sound revolutionary. His candor about the difficulty of balancing work inside the home and outside the home felt revolutionary because I couldn’t think of another male politician who had spoken so frankly about it. Saying that he wanted to go beyond the male provider model despite not being in a position to do it was a pretty extraordinary and rare admission from a man, let alone a world leader.
Although many reporters have been trying to shift the narrative, the sad truth is that we don’t often hear men being asked about fatherhood because parenting is still not considered a focal point for men. Jennifer Garner expressed this back in 2014 when she and her then-husband, Ben Affleck, came back from a press day with a very different set of questions. Although every single reporter asked Garner about how she balanced her family with her career, Affleck’s most recurring question was about how he balanced acting with his libido after spending so much time with Gone Girl costar Emily Ratajkowski’s breasts. “We’re talking about them—they are real and they are fabulous and everyone should take a look and enjoy,” Garner artfully said
about Ratajkowski’s breasts in a speech to a roomful of women at a Glamour event. “As for work-life balance, he said that no one asked him about it that day. As a matter of fact, no one had ever asked him about it. Not once.” Even Simone de Beauvoir, one of the most recognized and distinguished thinkers of her time, noticed this gross double standard and discussed it in her groundbreaking feminist oeuvre The Second Sex, in 1949. “I could not help but comment to my distinguished audience that every question asked about Sartre concerned his work, while all those asked about Beauvoir concerned her personal life,” she wrote.
Interestingly, since de Beauvoir wrote her book almost seventy years ago women have progressed immensely, receiving more interest and questions about their life outside the home, but curiously, men haven’t received more questions about their life inside the home. You’ll notice that Garner was asked about her job, but the accompanying questions about her role inside the home were only reserved for her and not her partner, Ben Affleck. Thanks to feminists who have fought for women to be perceived as more than simply mothers, the work that women do outside of the home has become accepted and valued. If Simone de Beauvoir suddenly came back from the dead, she would probably be impressed to see that one of the hard-earned victories of the feminist revolutions of the twenty-first century is that our culture has begun to view women beyond simply their roles as mothers. Although plenty of women choose to work only inside the home, the assumption has become that they can do both. Although there is still an enormous pressure to bear children and participate in motherhood, we have largely come to terms with the idea that most women work and that this is a good thing. Society even wholeheartedly celebrates women who pour themselves into it. It’s so accepted that Ivanka Trump, the daughter of one of the most reactionary presidents in modern US history, literally wrote a book titled Women Who Work. The importance of women’s roles in the workplace is celebrated regardless of political party, which for America, one of the most divided countries in the industrialized world, says a lot. It’s largely accepted and even encouraged in most industrialized countries that women have ambitions that go beyond the home. But although the gender revolution has been so far remarkable, it has been grossly incomplete: while women have been taken seriously as workers, men have yet to really be taken seriously as caretakers. And embracing the role of men in the home means shifting their role outside of it, or at least adapting the expectations that are associated with it. In other words, if men are to spend more time in the home, it probably means they are rethinking their relationship to the time they spend outside of it.
All this time we were so focused on getting people comfortable with the idea that women work, but that revolution was never followed by a movement saying it’s okay for men not to.
THE SILENT PANIC AMONGST MILLENIAL MEN
Although very few young men would admit this to me, the discomfort with this asymmetrical gender revolution reveals itself in the largely silent yet growing anxiety they have toward working women and their role as fathers. Although millennial men will say they are comfortable with shifting and blurring the roles of gender inside the home, when they’re asked about the same topic anonymously, their answers tell a different story. No man I spoke to admitted that he felt intimidated or uncomfortable with women’s economic and social gains, but their answers in anonymous polls reveal a discomfort with women’s empowerment and what it means for shifting gendered norms. Instead of feeling excited about a different kind of masculinity and a different way of being a man, young men are expressing fear around the idea of the role of a man in the family changing. In other words, although men’s increased participation in the home might be popular with feminists, it’s not necessarily popular with a lot of young men. Rather than seeing the model of the male breadwinner who works outside the home and the female housewife who works inside the home as outdated, they are clinging more firmly to it and to the traditional definition of being a man.
As academic and family studies professor Stephanie Coontz writes in The New York Times, “Overall, Americans aged 18 to 34 are less comfortable than their elders with the idea of women holding roles historically held by men.” She cites research by Joanna Pepin and David Cotter, who found that more young men today believe in the superiority of the male breadwinner model for their family than in 1994. Although only 42 percent of male high school seniors in 1994 believed the best model was a man working and a woman at home, that figure has curiously jumped to 58 percent today. Even the number of young men 18–25 who disagree with the statement “a woman’s place is in the home” has shockingly decreased. Their data also shows more young men today believe that a woman working outside the home harms preschool children. The number of men who believe that a working mother can have a relationship with her child that is as warm as that of a stay-at-home mom is also lower than it used to be. There’s also a significant and noticeable dip in support for working mothers between 2010 and 2014. Researchers say that drop has mostly been driven by young men. This signals that heterosexual millennial men, although more likely to be married to a working woman, are less supportive of her than their fathers were of their wives.
When I first came across this data, it felt counterintuitive, so odd that it felt like it couldn’t be true. It’s particularly shocking because millennial men are more progressive than their fathers in almost every other respect. I couldn’t find a single issue they were less tolerant of. They are more supporting of policies to protect the environment, of laws that promote income equality, they’re more likely to be supportive of LGBTQ rights and hell, they’re even more likely to identify as feminists and socialists. Why weren’t they embracing changing gendered roles along with all other radical causes? Why would they embrace change on every front but resist it in the case of their own partners?
The more I thought about it, the clearer it became to me. The male provider/female caretaker model was still the go-to model for men for one simple reason: there was no other alternative. Young men were resisting women being identified with that label because there was no other model for them to embrace instead. All this time we’ve focused on the changing role of women inside the workplace and inside the home, not realizing that this would also shift men’s. We updated what it means to be a woman, but we didn’t update what it meant to be a man. We’ve had articles, books, entire conferences, dedicated to helping women navigate these new shifting roles while expecting men to figure it out all on their own. If young men aren’t presented with a viable substitute for that model of the man as the provider, they’re stuck idealizing the only model they have. Men were secretly wondering: If she’s the provider, what does that make me?
I had a sneaking suspicion that men weren’t the only ones subscribing to this outdated version of manhood as defined by providing, and I was right. According to Pew Research data, the expectation to provide is not just something that men self-impose; women also expect it. Although a third of women make as much as or more than their partners, seven out of ten Americans overall think that providing is very important to be a good husband. Providing financially was even more important than contributing to domestic work in the home. Conversely, barely three out of ten Americans believe that it’s requisite to be a good wife, although men were significantly less likely than women to believe that providing should be part of a woman’s responsibilities. Moreover, the less education you have and the lower you are in terms of socioeconomic groups, the more likely you are to believe that men’s roles should be rooted in providing. So sure, men are limiting themselves to a narrow view of masculinity, but so is everyone else around them. It’s a cage we’re all trapped in. This means that some men might want to live more equitable lives and blur the lines of gendered expectations within their relationships, but the women they are in partnerships with might not always be interested. After all, they’ve absorbed the same messages about ideal masculinity that men have. As male relationship expert and author Terry Real put it in his conversation on therapist Kathy Caprino�
�s podcast, “Patriarchy does not exist only in men. The force of patriarchy is the water that we all swim in and we’re the fish.”
NURTURING FATHERHOOD IS STILL SEEN AS UNNATURAL
This myth of the sole male provider largely goes unnoticed for both women and men because we’re often told it’s part of men’s nature. Pop science is often used as a throwaway to justify the low standard we set for men. In fact, every time we have a thoughtful conversation about the involvement of fathers, there’s a classic counterargument that active fathering goes against men’s nature, which is fueled by the idea that women doing any other role than parenting, like providing financially, is against theirs. The rigidity with which we approach men’s and women’s roles in the family was clear from the panic expressed by conservative pundit Erick Erikson after Pew published data showing that 40 percent of breadwinners are now female. In an appearance on Fox News, he argued that women taking up the role of breadwinners and, consequently, fathers taking on the role of the caretaker was a threat to the gender role order. “When you look at biology, when you look at the natural world, the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role,” he told Lou Dobbs. “The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing; it’s a complementary role.” In another segment, where he was challenged by Megyn Kelly for his comments on Dobbs’s show, he protested against those who want to treat women and men equally as parents, warning that they believe “the male and female role are completely interchangeable.” Although the backlash to their views on female breadwinners being a threat to society was anti-woman, their assumptions about fathers in the family were just as insulting to men. In claiming that women spending time outside the home was dangerous is the inherent assumption that the father spending more time inside the home is not preferable either.
